Thoughts on tvtropes. I think it's shit. None of the page titles make any sense or suggest what they're talking about. All of the articles are mostly just made up of referring to other tropes by their confusing, made-up names so the whole thing is just nonsense and worthless.

>Poniko is a revolutionary. Inspired by the awfulness of Madotsuki's dream world, and not even her No-face pajamas bringing her emotional comfort, she decides to steal one of the TARDIS beds, come to the "real" world to get her medical license, and help the tormented souls, such as a hand-ectomy for Monoko that would not require bringing her to the shovel-beam. However, the rampant poverty inspired her to use a Latex Perfection mask or Magic Plastic Surgery to revolutionize oppressed and third-world companies, starting with Cuba.

>Poniko is black.Poniko was a black girl living in a world of light-skinned people, so she decided to try skin bleaching. The skin bleach not making much of a difference, she tried real bleach. It messed up her face(Uboa), andshescreamed(AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA) and cried(the blue eyes could actually be tears, if this theory is true, although the theory could be true without this). The reason her skin is pale now is because, after the incident, she switched to using light concealer.

>The Toriningen are birds that are angry at Madotsuki a la Angry Birds>The whole Poniko/Uboa event is supposed to be a parody of "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!".Poniko is thought to be the Princess, then BAM, when you hit the switch, Uboa is suddenly there 1/64ths of the time… mocking your futile attempts to get her to react and implying that she's in a different castle. Then you go to a completely different world.Uboa looks like Che GuevaraCompare this to this. He does. (Hey, if WALL•E can have a WMG just saying he looks like E.T…)I couldn't help but 'shop that after seeing this WMG and laughing a lot.Uboa is also the killer from the Scream movies and the first Scary Movie.Maybe she's just a very emo Shy Guy?

>Every single theory is true and interconnected, but with a slight twist… Well, this is quite obviously going to get a bit crazy, but just hear me out. So, Madotsuki is an insane, depressed young tranny (tomboy / intersexed individual / insert unusual gender-related issue-thing here) dealing with being raped while suffering through puberty in a post-apocalyptic world.…No, wait! Come back! I swear it gets better! Alright, so she (he? For the sake of argument, we'll stick with she) is going through life as usual (y'know, the whole "not gonna go outside" thing, the dreaming, bemoaning her terrible life) when she comes to the conclusion that the only way to "fix" everything is to go back in time and alter her future by both killing her rapist and acting as a new friend for herself so younger Madotsuki won't be so depressingly lonely. She realizes, however, that she probably cannot allow her younger self to know who she is, she decides to disguise herself as an attractive young blonde woman under the name "Poniko", believing that if she disguises herself as someone she would find attractive (yes, she's a lesbian), she'd be more likely to form a friendship with her.She goes back in time to her old school, only to see herself from a year or so (perhaps a few months) ago socializing with Monoe and her younger sister Monoko, two girls she suddenly remembers from her childhood. Recalling the tragic chain of events leading up Monoko's death at the hands of a speeding driver, causing Monoe to run away, never being found, Madotsuki (A.K.A. "Poniko") rushes over and introduces herself to the trio, hoping to befriend them all and hopefully prevent Monoko from getting killed. They all become close friends, hanging out all the time and sharing some of their best moments together. They even enroll in a piano class together, the four of them becoming very fond of their teacher, a sentimental young man named Komuro "Michael" (as his pale skin, hair and ability to moonwalk flawlessly reminded many of Michael Jackson) Sakamoto Dada Sensei, often called Masada-Sensei. He cared for the girls as if he was their older brother, becoming an honorary fifth member of their "clique". Other than the girls, his biggest pleasure (not like that you pervs D:<) in life was the piano. That and drugs, of course. One day, he crashed, leading to him getting fired, causing him to fall into a deep depression. He withdrew himself, shutting himself in his house and locking out all outside life. Madotsuki and "Poniko", wanting to cheer up their friend and teacher, tried to go to his place and do something for him. Unfortunely, they ended up getting lost in a dark forest near his house, where they encountered and seemingly friendly man offering them colorful candy if they let him "rub" them. After their refusual, he turned violent (as indicated by the menacing and somewhat phallic expression on his face), attacking and raping Madotsuki. "Poniko" tried helping before the man pulled out a knife and slashed at her, creating a deep wound on her abdomen (which she covered up with heavy turtleneck sweaters from that day forth). Madotsuki managed to yell out "Run Poniko, save yourself!" before the man slit her throat and left her in the forest to die.Frantic, "Poniko" found the man's car, with the key still in the ignition, and drove off, going as fast as possible, eventually losing him but driving on out of fear and guilt. Accidentally running a red light, she doesn't notice Monoe and Monoko speaking with Masada-Sensei and his gay lover, the girls (and his lover) somehow having managed to get Masada out of his house. Poniko plows through Monoko and Masada's lover, freaking out Monoe and Masada-Sensei. Jumping out of the car, "Poniko" notices the body, taking in the bones sticking out of Monoko's arms, the pool of blood and brain matter around her head, the trail of drool hanging out of her mouth and the single tear gliding down her pale face. Looking to her friends, her heart sinks as Monoe's ever-present smile fades as she runs off (disappears). Masada locks himself up in his house once more, the once tenacious, outgoing man becoming silent and gloomy. "Poniko", now harboring an intense hatred for herself, goes home and kills herself. Madotsuki, barely alive, manages to go home and treat her wounds, healing completely but still emotionally and mentally disturbed from both the even and the news of Monoko's death, Monoe's disappearance and Masada's self-induced seclusion. She decides to go to "Poniko's" house for support. Noticing how, for whatever reason, "Poniko's" house looked especially peaceful that day, Mado enters using the key she had made, only to discover her friend half dead on the floor,

>smiling intently at Mado, who responds by recoiling in terror. "Poniko", who had failed in killing herself… somehow… shuffles over to Madotsuki and begins babbling incoherently about Cuban revolutionaries before confessing her love to Madotsuki and asking her to "join her", saying it will "ease the pain". Madotsuki admits to loving "Poniko" back, but states that she is confused as to what joining her would entail. Without warning, "Poniko" attacks Mado, who manages to escape the other girl's violence before watching her fall to the floor and die, her blood and vomit contrasting with the upbeat, girly interior of her home. The sun sets, giving the scene an eerie quality that sends Mado running home, where she pulls a Masada-Sensei and locks herself in her room, never leaving. After a while, she begins having odd dreams representing the events of her life, before finally choosing to end it all by jumping off of the balcony to commit suicide. Unfortunately for her, she finds out that she was still dreaming (although the events prior, as in Monoko's death and it's causes were real) and decides to take action, going back in time both to clear her mind (and dreams) and to right the wrongs caused by the well meaning "Poniko", all while dressed as her so it as if she is correcting her own wrongs.

>"Yume Nikki" is an Alice In Wonderland fanwork.Madotsuki, however, is already a very creative and strange girl. When she jumped off the balcony, she went into "Wonderland" with even more absurdities than her dreams. The blood stain is simply tea that Madotsuki accidentally spilled during a party with the Mad Hatter and co. Jellyfish seem to be attracted to the ingredients.

>Kikiyama is/was an introverted, bullied 13-year old girl, and Madotsuki is a self-insert. A lot of the effects could stem from teasing over things like weight, appearance and hair length/color. Some of them even seem to come from Japanese folk tales, or activities done over the seasons (bicycle, hat and scarf, etc).

>Yume Nikki is an ameteur horror story written by an actual girl, Madotsuki, who is known as Kikiyama on the internet.She's challenged herself to write a horror story with a new chapter every night. As a child, she has homework, chores and other responsibilities to tend to, however. So, she's locked herself in her room and vows never to leave her room until the story is finally finished. The effects are large parts that she plans to incorporate into her story. When you collect all the effects, she realizes that there is literally no end to the story, and her mind will keep on generating horrifying creatures. Her life literally HAS become the story in itself. She halts the original plot, and rewrites it as a dream diary.She couldn't get the story published, as she is a kid, so she made use of RPG Maker and released a game adaption for free. This also explains the gameplay. Kikiyama/Madotsuki probably isn't interested in making an RPG, she just wants the story made public. Yes, Kikiyama is a girl.

>Kikiyama killed him/herself and Yume Nikki is his/her suicide note. Kikiyama's website has not been updated for a year and a half; YN's changelog states that it hasn't been updated since October 2007. Kikiyama, a depressed individual, created the game as a metaphor for his/her daily existence and released it onto the internet as a sort of cry for help. Eventually, the pain became unbearable and he committed suicide before he could fully finish the game.

>Madotsuki is reliving World War II in her dreamsThe White Desert is her stumbling upon a Concentration Camp, far away from all civilization. The toriningen are her interpretation of the SS, and the small area with the tiny houses is the concentration camp itself. Feel free to add to this WMG if you find any other connections.

>Building off the After the End theory; The world has ended and Madotsuki is the last person on Earth. But she has a mission to complete.More specifically, she's a Messianic Archetype. With the destruction of the world, a new world has begun to appear; a world ruled by demons and manifestations of fear, evil, primal emotions and memories, etc. However this world doesn't technically exist yet, it resides inside Madotsuki's head, since she's The Chosen One. She must enter this world and conquer it by facing these manifestations and collecting the Effects, which are whatever she wants them to be, because she's a God-in-Training. What's most important though is what she does with them in the Hub, or the Center of the "New World", at the end… She places the effects in the Center of the New World and they become Eggs. Now finally Madotsuki goes back to the Old World one last time… to leap off her building. By doing this she leaves the Old World behind, and Ascends To A Higher Plane Of Existence as the God of the New World. The Eggs hatch, banishing all the demons and horrible things in the New World and purifying it so life can begin again. The blood stain left behind doesn't represent Madotsuki dying, but instead the death of the Old World, which no longer exists.

>Madotsuki needs to get laid. She's too hikikomori to do anything in real life. In dreams, of course, it's not a problem. Cat effect? Drawing things toward her? That's just suspicious. Uboa represents a penis. KyuKyu-kun is a giant dick. Masada? Attractive male with a dick, of course. Knife? Phallic imagery!

>Madoutsuki is traumatized by rugs. Those Aztec Gods that she's terrified of? They're the embodiment of the rug in her bedroom. She keeps trying to throw it away, but it always comes back. Also, the rug is a Time Lord.

>Madotsuki is a troper and her dreams have been corrupted by everyone else's less pleasant WMG entries. It's already happened to me, so why not? My other theory is that she doesn't know what's going on at all, has no control over it, and we're just being controlled by the ghost of Freud.

>>16861>>16860>>16859Sorry man, this is also pretty fucking funny, if you are still triggered by bronies and their need to put ponies into everything then you are always going to be in hell when you get on the Internet.

>>16864No, it's all completely utter shit and fanfiction. Nothing at all hints that Kikiyama is either male or female, these faggots believe so only because Mado is a girl and thus "Kikiyama ought to be a girl too cuz the game is bout her xdxdx"

>>16867Maybe I've been blessed to not be in the places where Undertale fans gather but I've never seen anything really bad coming from them.

It just seems like a somewhat interesting take on RPGs from the little I've seen, I've never really played because I'm not into RPGs but I'm tempted to try it because it's constantly on sale. Again, never really seen their cancer.

The game is very meh if you ask me. It's basically a really simple danmaku game mixed with a very simple rpg. The game play mechanics basically have zero depth. The usual strategizing that you expect from rpgs isn't there and neither is the usual difficulty of bullet hell games. The route of the game is basically the exact opposite of yume nikki's in that it's extremely linear with zero exploration involved despite it's top down perspective. Most of the game is made up of easter eggs. I think the main reason why people hate is because the game is full of sjw toxins like the character's gender being ambiguous and a forced gay relationship between a dinosaur, thing neet and a fish woman. The game itself isn't too bad in that respect, but the fanbase base cranks it up to eleven.

It makes me a little pissed when people tout the place like it spawns critics oozing with fine taste.>>16801This, and maybe trivia. Other than that, it feels like a whole bunch of nothing. It's like humanity's need to recognise patterns and categorise in website form, super-concentrated. OP has it down, it's a circlejerk with trope titles as their slang. It’s just another place for fans to discuss works but barely conceals this by masquerading as an informational site.

Anyone who wants to make a story should avoid TVTropes like the plague. If you're striving for originality, seeing all the other works that do a trope you're considering will just make you feel bad (it's very hard to be completely original in modern day anyway, still try to tell a fresh spin on whatever your concept is but the point is to spare yourself this artistic flagellation). Say I wanted >"a Hero’s Journey, with an anti-hero and a Big Bad but let’s subvert him by making him The Cutie who is a Stepford Smiler”Nevermind that the Hero's Journey is not a guide, just a pattern, what do those other phrases even mean?

TVTropes' page for the 'Big Bad' is a(n awful) description and list of every work that includes a prominent main antagonist. That's all it is. You plan to make a villain with a lot of screentime? That's a Big Bad. Don't beat yourself up for being like nearly every story ever or force yourself to create a work with no antagonist if it doesn't come naturally. This applies to other character tropes.

The other extreme, embracing the tropes, results in shallowness because you're adding elements of other stories to your own without understanding how or why that element came to be in the original context. I don't mean taking inspiration or using something you like (e.g, writing a tsundere character because you enjoy 'tsundere'ish traits, because what creator doesn't?), but literally going on TVTropes and picking out trope pages that fit your premise. Which, by the looks of the site's 'So You Want to Write…' guides, is an approach they encourage. And yes I've seen people coming up with characters and plots cherrypicking this way.

If reality is like a first-hand source for your stories, with other fiction as second, then TVTropes is a totally biased reference filtered by fanwank because everything written there is an echo-chamber of people gathering similar examples of what they think a trope should be. Because nothing is cited and anyone can edit, if enough people decide an anti-hero is a gritty, frowny badass who still saves people, then it will be.

Trope editors seem self-aware to spot when tropes are undone or spun in unusual ways and every archetype has examples that followed it a little differently than the last. Unfortunately, this results in gigantic lists, categories of ‘subversions’, ‘inversions’, ‘deconstructions’ and even ‘reconstructions’. It becomes meaningless, so the most pervasive trope articles aren’t even good as a reference to define themselves.>”Trope X is this, except when they’re that, so we’ve split the trope into type a, b and c, compare Trope Y, contrast with Trope Z!”

And how does any of this help you write your plot? It fucking doesn’t.

Let’s take the anti-hero example. It’s a hero who is imperfect and flawed. A troper specifically chooses to plot an anti-hero because he doesn’t want to write a boring good guy, because the tropes page for anti-heroes sounds good and is filled with even more tropes to play with. Now step back. As murky as the definition for anti-hero is, this person hasn’t plotted a single thing that their character does. What he’s done is decide what this character will be ‘’perceived’’ as, jumping the steps all the way to deciding how his audience will see his OC without writing a thing to warrant that reputation.

It's because of this that I think that thinking in tropes is harmful to making a good story.

The best storytellers have done their job lifetimes before TVTropes even existed. They did not need this vast laundry list of archetypes, motifs and common story elements because stories and writing is a lot more than simply hashing together the right formula. /endrant

>>18556The worst part about tvtropes is that I actually like the concept. Patterns and cliches do exist in ficion and I do think that that could spawn an actually interesting encyclopedia. Maybe the history of the trope and how its origins and development were affected by the real world could be discussed to add some more substance, or maybe instead of just describing a trope, there could also be an explanation of the motivations writers have for using that trope and how it could be done better or worse. There's a million better ways to make a better tvtropes, but to make them you have to actually rub two brain cells together so it doesn't become a lazy clusterfuck.>literally going on TVTropes and picking out trope pages that fit your premiseOh, god, people actually do that? That is hands down the worst way to write a story that I have ever heard. I heard once from somewhere that good artists borrow, and great artists steal; they force their accumulated influences through their own creative process. Picking out tropes to make some fanfiction tier garbage is like imagining that you're asking somebody else to ask another guy to borrow something for a quick second.

I agree with a lot of this. Good characters are three dimensional, well-written, and complex. Their personalities should not consist of jargon that makes up a basic, overdone archetype. In my opinion, tvtropes is good if you want to read a quick summary of a work, but not much else. People shouldn't be applying tropes to real life.

>>18557>There's a million better ways to make a better tvtropes, but to make them you have to actually rub two brain cells together so it doesn't become a lazy clusterfuck.

Tvtropes was actually worse a few years back, when Fast Eddie ran it. Recently, the site was revamped to get rid of shit like troper tales. It's a lot better than it used to be, but still has godawful pages like the ones posted here. Personally I wish the YN article would be rewritten and the WMG page done away with. It would be much better in that case.>Oh god, people actually do that?

I feel like only people who use tvtropes would do that. Competent authors actually put effort into writing their cast.

>>18557If you don't already know of this, you may be interested in the Aarne-Thompson classification system, it's specifically for folktales and groups them together in stuff they have in common. I think you're onto something, folklorists and other areas of study might already do this, without the tropey autism and rambling. Yeah, I personally 'wrote by tropes' myself once and nothing came of it because it didn't magically gel into a plot like I was expecting. What I ended up having was a genre written down, character -designs- (not even characters) and a shitload of tabs open on tropes I wanted to include or 'subvert'. Didn't even have a synopsis from start to end, any chapter summaries or even a single event down. I genuinely thought what I was doing was part of the process of writing but it was procrastinating at best, delaying the birth of whatever trope-infested spawn I envisioned at the time.>good artists borrow, and great artists stealFunny you mention that, I was going to say something like that in the post you replied to but I wasn't sure how it went. I thought it was like "good artists steal, great artists get away with it" but maybe that's a tongue-in-cheek warped version picked up from somewhere.>I feel like only people who use tvtropes would do that. Competent authors actually put effort into writing their cast.Definitely. Well, I would've said I was trying as a troper but it's seriously misguided effort.

>>18595I haven't heard of it before, but it seems very interesting. It's definitely not perfect, but it's miles ahead of tv trope's cluster fuck approach. The longer, but more descriptive names are a lot better than something short, but made up. I prefer Cruel mother-in-law plans death of daughter-in-law to the dobbly foobly. I find it interesting that there's no index for character types. I guess that might fall under motifs. It still has problems like looking at stories on a macro-level instead of delving into deeper analysis and stories being grouped into one tale type despite having having a lot of differences. It's also just an index system, so I don't think there's any articles attached to the index entries. It could definitely work as a model for how things should be done though. Thanks for sharing.